Leonid Ivanovich Dobychin ( — March 28, 1936(?)) was a Russian writer.

Early life

The author's father was Ivan Andrianovich Dobychin (1855—1902), who in 1896 moved the family to Dvinsk (now Daugavpils

Daugavpils

Daugavpils is a city in southeastern Latvia, located on the banks of the Daugava River, from which the city gets its name. Daugavpils literally means "Daugava Castle". With a population of over 100,000, it is the second largest city in the country after the capital Riga, which is located some...

); his mother, Anna Aleksandrovna, was a well-known midwife in Dvinsk. Leonid had two younger brothers and two sisters. He studied in the Dvinsk Modern School (a non-classical high school), and in 1911 entered Saint Petersburg Polytechnical University

Saint Petersburg Polytechnical University

Saint Petersburg State Polytechnical University is a major Russian technical university situated in Saint Petersburg. Previously it was known as the Peter the Great Polytechnical Institute and Kalinin Polytechnical Institute .-Imperial Russia:...

, graduating in 1916. In 1918 he moved to Bryansk

Bryansk

Bryansk is a city and the administrative center of Bryansk Oblast, Russia, located southwest of Moscow. Population: -History:The first written mention of Bryansk was in 1146, in the Hypatian Codex, as Debryansk...

, where he worked as a teacher and statistician.

Career

His first stories were published in 1924 in the Leningrad journal Russkii sovremennik. In the autumn of 1925 Dobychin made his first, unsuccessful, attempt to relocate to Leningrad. At this time he came to know the Chukovskys

Korney Chukovsky

Korney Ivanovich Chukovsky was one of the most popular children's poets in the Russian language. His poems, Doctor Aybolit , The Giant Roach , The Crocodile , and Wash'em'clean have been favourites with many generations of Russophone children...

; later he became acquainted with a wide circle of authors, including Mikhail Slonimsky

Mikhail Slonimsky

Mikhail Leonidovich Slonimsky was a Soviet writer, member of the Serapion Brothers group.Mikhail was born in Saint Petersburg to the family of Intelligentsia. His grandfather, father and aunt were professional writers. His uncle Semyon Vengerov was a famous philologist and literary critic...

, Veniamin Kaverin

Veniamin Kaverin

Veniamin Alexandrovich Kaverin was a Soviet writer associated with the early 1920s movement of the Serapion Brothers. The immunologist Lev Zilber was his older brother, and the critic Yury Tynyanov was his brother-in-law....

, Yury Tynyanov

Yury Tynyanov

Yury Nikolaevich Tynyanov was a famous Soviet/Russian writer, literary critic, translator, scholar and screenwriter. He was an authority on Pushkin and an important member of the Russian Formalist school.-Life and work:...

, Evgeny Shvarts

Evgeny Shvarts

Evgeny Lvovich Shvarts was a Soviet writer and playwright whose works include twenty-five plays and screenplays for three films .- Life :...

, Gennady Gor, and Leonid Rakhmanov. His story collections Vstrechi s Liz (Encounters with Lise, 1927) and Portret (The portrait, 1931) portray the clash of the former Russian world with the new Soviet reality; they exemplify a lyrical "antipsychologism." In his only novel, Gorod En (The town of N, 1935), a boy recalls his family, school, and romances and the Russo-Japanese War

Russo-Japanese War

The Russo-Japanese War was "the first great war of the 20th century." It grew out of rival imperial ambitions of the Russian Empire and Japanese Empire over Manchuria and Korea...

; his village is modeled on "the town of N" from Gogol's Dead Souls

Dead Souls

Dead Souls is a novel by Nikolai Gogol, first published in 1842, and widely regarded as an exemplar of 19th-century Russian literature. Gogol himself saw it as an "epic poem in prose", and within the book as a "novel in verse". Despite supposedly completing the trilogy's second part, Gogol...

. When the novel was published, it did not attract the attention of the censors, but the following year it was the object of vicious criticism in an attack on formalism

Russian formalism

Russian formalism was an influential school of literary criticism in Russia from the 1910s to the 1930s. It includes the work of a number of highly influential Russian and Soviet scholars such as Viktor Shklovsky, Yuri Tynianov, Vladimir Propp, Boris Eichenbaum, Roman Jakobson, Grigory Vinokur who...

 among Leningrad writers. After the stormy meeting of the Leningrad Writers' Union on March 25, 1936, Dobychin disappeared; he is presumed to have committed suicide, and his body was fished out of the Neva months later.

Solomon Volkov

Solomon Volkov

Solomon Moiseyevich Volkov is a Russian journalist and musicologist. He is best known for Testimony, which was published in 1979 following his emigration from the Soviet Union in 1976...

wrote:

A writer who surpassed Zoshchenko in a desire for simplicity and laconic writing was Leonid Dobychin, a remote and lonely man who managed to produce three small books before vanishing in 1936... Dobychin's works, which were greatly esteemed among Leningrad writers, were met with hostility by the critics as collections of "man-in-the-street gossip, foul anecdotes and operetta episodes." A critic reviewing Dobychin's book fumed, "The streets of Leningrad are filled with various people, most of whom are healthy, life-loving and energetic builders of socialism, but the author writes: 'Gnats bustled.'" ... Dobychin's work was an extreme expression of the attempts by some masters of the new Petersburg prose to achieve simplicity and a laconic tone.

The same author said, "In Leningrad, people compared him to Joyce and Proust, although he wrote microscopic stories." Kaverin wrote, "The author — indignant, ironic, pained by the vulgarity of some and the unconscious cruelty of others — is clearly visible on every page." And according to Boris Lanin, "Dobychin's experimentalism was not understood by his contemporaries, as it adhered neither to the dictates of socialist realism nor imitated the ornamental prose of Pil'niak and Zamiatin, and he remained on the periphery of Russian literary life." Dobychin's work was not republished in Russia until 1989.

Translations

• Richard Chandler Borden and Natalia Belova (tr.), The Town of N (Northwestern University Press, 1998), ISBN 0810115891
• Richard Chandler Borden and Natalia Belova (tr.),, Encounters with Lise and other stories (Northwestern University Press, 2005), ISBN 0810119722

External links

• Selection of works (in Russian, with photo)